Comments on variation in the "painterly" quality of originals. As a scientific illustrator, one of the first things I learned was how to control the texture of my images. I've always admired "painterly" paintings, where the texture of the paint and the motions of the artist's brush strokes celebrate both the paint and the process of painting. However, this look is generally not acceptable in the scientific illustration field. As a result, I've gone back and forth with these qualities, choosing to make some paintings painterly while making others tightly illustrative - examples of this variation appear below in detail shots of three different paintings (click to enlarge). The amberjack painting is fairly illustrative, with most of the brush strokes softened and blended. The skipjack tuna painting represents an intermediate painterly quality, with only a partial softening of brush strokes, and finally the landscape represents my natural painting technique, with much less concern about the appearance of brush strokes and glazes. My new encaustic paintings (see Current Projects) are inherently painterly, yet the technique allows nearly perfect blending if I want it - this is a large part of what intrigues me about this ancient medium.
